How to cut your home energy costs

It has never been more expensive to keep your home warm. Alex Rankine explains how to keep your home energy costs down

Father and child putting clothes in a washing machine
Turning the temperature down to 30°C can reduce electricity usage by 57%
(Image credit: © iStockphotos)

Keeping the house warm has never been pricier. UK wholesale gas prices have hit another record: at £3.24 a therm they are dramatically higher than the 50p level seen for much of last year, and energy suppliers are dropping like flies. Zog Energy has just become the 25th firm to go to the wall over the last four months. The renewed surge in wholesale prices means more could follow.

If your energy supplier goes bust then regulator Ofgem will switch you to a “supplier of last resort”. Just remember to take a meter reading to send to the new supplier. Shopping around for a better deal seems pointless – as Miles Brignall puts it in The Guardian, “normally, switching would be the response to rising prices”, but “the energy market has all but seized up”.

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.